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Tom G. Palmer
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Tom Gordon Palmer (born 1956 in Bitburg-Mötsch, Germany) is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, Vice President for International Programs, director of the Center for Promotion of Human Rights, and director of the Institute's educational division, Cato University.
er earned his B.A. in liberal arts from St. John's College, his M.A. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America, and his doctorate in political science from Oxford University, where he was an H.
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Encyclopedia
Tom Gordon Palmer (born 1956 in Bitburg-Mötsch, Germany) is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, Vice President for International Programs, director of the Center for Promotion of Human Rights, and director of the Institute's educational division, Cato University.
Professional life
Palmer earned his B.A. in liberal arts from St. John's College, his M.A. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America, and his doctorate in political science from Oxford University, where he was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College.
Palmer has been active in the promotion of libertarian and classical liberal ideas and policies since the early 1970s. He has been editor of several publications, including Dollars & Sense (the newspaper of the National Taxpayers Union), Update, and the Humane Studies Review, and has published articles in such newspapers and magazines as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Spectator of London, National Review, Slate, Ethics, and the Cato Journal.
He teaches political economy and legal and constitutional history for the Institute for Humane Studies and the . He also works with such organizations as , the , and the , which designated him in 2005 a member of their "." He blogs at his own and at and is a contributor to the . Palmer is the director of Cato University, a summer seminar sponsored by the Cato Institute.
Involvement in Eastern Europe
Before joining the Cato Institute, he was a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. During the late 1980s and the very early 1990s he worked with the Institute for Humane Studies and other organizations to spread classical-liberal/libertarian ideas in Eastern Europe. He traveled throughout the region to hold seminars and smuggled books, cash, photocopiers, and fax machines from an office in Vienna, Austria. He arranged for translation and publication into a variety of central and eastern European languages of textbooks in economics and law, as well as seminal works by Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other thinkers in the libertarian and liberal traditions. He remains active in the region as organizer of a major Russian website () and a conference on "" in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia.
Involvement in Middle East
Palmer is currently attempting to duplicate in the Middle East some of the work he did in Eastern Europe. He has commissioned translation into Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, and Azeri) and publication of works by Frederic Bastiat, F. A. Hayek, James Madison, and other libertarian influences, and has published essays in Middle Eastern languages on such topics as "Challenges of Democratization" and "Religion and the Law." In April 2005 Palmer addressed members of the Iraqi parliament in the parliamentary assembly hall on constitutionalism and has written on Iraq. He has also promoted the creation of a libertarian web site, , where it is available in Arabic, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and Persian; and started an Arabic publishing venture. His involvement in the Middle East has been applauded by some and criticized by others. He continues to lecture in the Middle East and works closely with Arabic and Persian bloggers. He has been actively involved in campaigning for free speech rights in the Middle East, notably with the campaign to free , through articles in the , the of Lebanon, and .
Works
Palmer has published essays on the philosophy of individual rights (e.g., in an essay from Individual Rights Reconsidered, edited by Tibor Machan (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2001), a substantive response to G. A. Cohen's attack on property rights, several responses to the theories of Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes, and essays on multicultural politics, on globalization, on globalization and personal and cultural identity, and on libertarian political philosophy. Palmer also published an extensive bibliographical essay on libertarianism in The Libertarian Reader, edited by David Boaz. He has published law review articles on intellectual property that have garnered substantial attention within the legal and technological community for his general critique of patents and copyrights and his suggestions of contractual and technological solutions to the problems for which intellectual property rights are usually proposed as solutions. Palmer also currently publishes a popular blog.
Political activities
Palmer's political activities include being founding member and national secretary of the Committee Against Registration and the Draft (1979-81), president of the Oxford Civil Liberties Society (1993-94), and manager or communications director for several political campaigns. He was a plaintiff in Parker v. District of Columbia, a successful lawsuit in Washington, D.C. to secure the right to own a handgun in one's home, based on the text of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case had particular personal significance for him, in that he once survived an attempted assault because he was armed with a handgun. (Palmer believes that his attackers were motivated by anti-gay animus; he is openly gay.)
External links
About Palmer
- , Cato Institute
- , Tom Palmer's personal weblog
- —Jonathan Rauch on Palmer's work in Arab world
Criticisms and critical exchanges with others
- , Reason, June 2006
- , a response to Jeffrey Friedman's critique of libertarianism
- , in part a critique of Tom Palmer's philosophy of rights, by Jeffrey Friedman
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